Multipartite Entangled States, Symmetric Matrices, and Error-Correcting Codes

A pure quantum state is called k-uniform if all its reductions to k-qudit are maximally mixed. We investigate the general constructions of k-uniform pure quantum states of n subsystems with d levels. We provide one construction via symmetric matrices and the second one through the classical error-correcting codes. There are three main results arising from our constructions. First, we show that for any given even n ≥ 2, there always exists an n/2-uniform n-qudit quantum state of level p for sufficiently large prime p. Second, both constructions show that there exist k-uniform n-qudit pure quantum states such that k is proportional to n, i.e., k = Ω(n) although the construction from symmetric matrices in general outperforms the one by error-correcting codes. Third, our symmetric matrix construction provides a positive answer to the open question on whether there exists a 3-uniform n-qudit pure quantum state for all n ≥ 8. In fact, we can further prove that, for every k, there exists a constant M
_k
such that there exists a k-uniform n-qudit quantum state for all n ≥ M
_k
. In addition, by using the concatenation of algebraic geometry codes, we give an explicit construction of k-uniform quantum state when k tends to infinity.